Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Just a quick shout about new release of Synapse - 0.2.4! There aren't too many user visible changes in this release, besides a few new plugins. Mostly polishing and more polishing.

Anyhow here's the changelog:

added Calculator plugin

multiple fixes to Zeitgeist searches

add plugin descriptions (links to wiki)

added simple Launchpad plugin

added Pastebin plugin

added Copy to clipboard action

added Imgur plugin (uploads images to imgur)

added Selection plugin (execute actions on currently selected text)

small UI fixes and speedups

multiple smaller bug fixes

If you like Synapse, you can help out by writing plugin descriptions on our wiki, just click the help button in Synapse's preferences window (in the plugin tab) and you'll be taken to a wiki page (most likely empty right now) where all other users will then be able to read this.

Tarballs are at the usual place. Ubuntu users using our bleeding edge PPA (ppa:synapse-core/testing) could have been enjoying most of these improvements for quite some time, but the new packages have now been built also on our stable PPA (ppa:synapse-core/ppa).

Monday, 14 February 2011

As many of you probably noticed, last week there was Zeitgeist hackfest happening at Aarhus, and here's a short summary of what I've done (you probably already read Mikkel's and Seif's posts about it).

My overall mantra was to get the necessary bits for proper Zeitgeist integration upstream, and I dare to say that this worked out quite well:

the Gio patch which provides us with extra information about application launches is now part of official GLib 2.28 (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641395)

this allowed us to remove the non-standard Gio module from libzeitgeist, and its job will be now done by zeitgeist-datahub

zeitgeist-datahub received a couple of updates - I ported it to use GDBus (which was a nice experience in Vala) and added the module that listens for application launches

for quite some time we have had plugins for many applications in Zeitgeist Data Sources project, but to make it easier for users to get these, I ported a few of them to use libpeas and requested merging them to their upstream projects, therefore in the next GNOME release the Zeitgeist integration plugins for Totem, gedit, and Rhythmbox will be just a click away.

libzeitgeist also received many bug fixes, and I hope the new GDBus series will now be as stable as the older dbus-glib powered one (and maybe even more), now the only thing that's missing there is GObject introspection annotations and making the API a bit more friendly for non-C uses.

Seif also implemented the grid plugin based on my idea :) and hopefully this work will continue in some form, preferably something usable by multiple applications - a zeitgeist-gtk library comes to mind :)

I also feel obliged to thank the #gedit guys, who have been very helpful, and let me tell you that they have a very nice plugin architecture now ;)